Alistair Knott
Biographic Data
| ID | 1170150 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alistair Knott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alistair |
| FAMILY NAME | Knott |
| SIGNATURE | KNOTT A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4227-4387 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
AI content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: New obligations for media and tech companies
The world is about to be swamped by an unprecedented wave of AI-generated content. We need reliable ways of identifying such content, to supplement the many existing social institutions that enable trust between people and organisations and ensure social resilience. In this paper, we begin by highlighting an important new development: providers of AI content generators have new obligations to support the creation of reliable detectors for the con…
Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release
The new wave of ‘foundation models’—general-purpose generative AI models, for production of text (e.g., ChatGPT) or images (e.g., MidJourney)—represent a dramatic advance in the state of the art for AI. But their use also introduces a range of new risks, which has prompted an ongoing conversation about possible regulatory mechanisms. Here we propose a specific principle that should be incorporated into legislation: that any organization developin…
Transparency in Algorithmic and Human Decision-Making: Is There a Double Standard
Guests on the Aegean: Interactions between migrants and volunteers at Europe’s southern border
Many would-be tourists were dissuaded from vacationing on Greece’s Aegean islands in 2016, in the aftermath of 2015’s ‘migrant crisis’. However, the islands witnessed an increased arrival of atypical ‘tourists’, among them volunteers intent on helping. This study is based on research undertaken on the islands of Lesvos and Chios in Greece as a volunteer myself. I focus on the figure of the volunteer, as an emergent humanitarian actor in border re…
What can Neighbourhood Density effects tell us about word learning? Insights from a connectionist model of vocabulary development
In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbourhood density (ND) on vocabulary size in a computational model of vocabulary development. A word has a high ND if there are many words phonologically similar to it. High ND words are more easily learned by infants of all abilities (e.g. Storkel, 2009; Stokes, 2014). We present a neural network model that learns general phonotactic patterns in the exposure language, as well as specific word forms…
Anaphora and Discourse Structure
We argue in this article that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by …
Levels of Representation in Discourse Relations
Beyond elaboration: The interaction of relations and focus in coherent text
The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages
A Feature-Based Account of the Relations Signalled by Sentence and Clause Connectives
This paper describes a three-stage methodology for investigating the semantics and pragmatics of sentence and clause connective phrases. The first step in the methodology is to assemble a large corpus of connectives. The second step is to organize this corpus into a hierarchical taxonomy of synonyms and hyponyms, using a pre-theoretical substitution test. The final step, upon which we concentrate in this paper, is to impose a theoretical interpre…
Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations
The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the “relations” that hold between the elements of that text has become fairly common currency, both in the study of discourse coherence and in the field of text generation. The set of relations proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1987) has had particular influence in both of these fields. But the widespread adoption of “relational” terminology belies a certain amount of confusi…
The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages
Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations
The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the “relations” that hold between the elements of that text has become fairly common currency, both in the study of discourse coherence and in the field of text generation. The set of relations proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1987) has had particular influence in both of these fields. But the widespread adoption of “relational” terminology belies a certain amount of confusi…
Anaphora and Discourse Structure
We argue in this article that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by …
A Feature-Based Account of the Relations Signalled by Sentence and Clause Connectives
This paper describes a three-stage methodology for investigating the semantics and pragmatics of sentence and clause connective phrases. The first step in the methodology is to assemble a large corpus of connectives. The second step is to organize this corpus into a hierarchical taxonomy of synonyms and hyponyms, using a pre-theoretical substitution test. The final step, upon which we concentrate in this paper, is to impose a theoretical interpre…
Guests on the Aegean: Interactions between migrants and volunteers at Europe’s southern border
Many would-be tourists were dissuaded from vacationing on Greece’s Aegean islands in 2016, in the aftermath of 2015’s ‘migrant crisis’. However, the islands witnessed an increased arrival of atypical ‘tourists’, among them volunteers intent on helping. This study is based on research undertaken on the islands of Lesvos and Chios in Greece as a volunteer myself. I focus on the figure of the volunteer, as an emergent humanitarian actor in border re…
Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations
The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the “relations” that hold between the elements of that text has become fairly common currency, both in the study of discourse coherence and in the field of text generation. The set of relations proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1987) has had particular influence in both of these fields. But the widespread adoption of “relational” terminology belies a certain amount of confusi…
A Feature-Based Account of the Relations Signalled by Sentence and Clause Connectives
This paper describes a three-stage methodology for investigating the semantics and pragmatics of sentence and clause connective phrases. The first step in the methodology is to assemble a large corpus of connectives. The second step is to organize this corpus into a hierarchical taxonomy of synonyms and hyponyms, using a pre-theoretical substitution test. The final step, upon which we concentrate in this paper, is to impose a theoretical interpre…
The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages
Beyond elaboration: The interaction of relations and focus in coherent text
Levels of Representation in Discourse Relations
Anaphora and Discourse Structure
We argue in this article that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by …
What can Neighbourhood Density effects tell us about word learning? Insights from a connectionist model of vocabulary development
In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbourhood density (ND) on vocabulary size in a computational model of vocabulary development. A word has a high ND if there are many words phonologically similar to it. High ND words are more easily learned by infants of all abilities (e.g. Storkel, 2009; Stokes, 2014). We present a neural network model that learns general phonotactic patterns in the exposure language, as well as specific word forms…
Guests on the Aegean: Interactions between migrants and volunteers at Europe’s southern border
Many would-be tourists were dissuaded from vacationing on Greece’s Aegean islands in 2016, in the aftermath of 2015’s ‘migrant crisis’. However, the islands witnessed an increased arrival of atypical ‘tourists’, among them volunteers intent on helping. This study is based on research undertaken on the islands of Lesvos and Chios in Greece as a volunteer myself. I focus on the figure of the volunteer, as an emergent humanitarian actor in border re…
Transparency in Algorithmic and Human Decision-Making: Is There a Double Standard
Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release
The new wave of ‘foundation models’—general-purpose generative AI models, for production of text (e.g., ChatGPT) or images (e.g., MidJourney)—represent a dramatic advance in the state of the art for AI. But their use also introduces a range of new risks, which has prompted an ongoing conversation about possible regulatory mechanisms. Here we propose a specific principle that should be incorporated into legislation: that any organization developin…
AI content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: New obligations for media and tech companies
The world is about to be swamped by an unprecedented wave of AI-generated content. We need reliable ways of identifying such content, to supplement the many existing social institutions that enable trust between people and organisations and ensure social resilience. In this paper, we begin by highlighting an important new development: providers of AI content generators have new obligations to support the creation of reliable detectors for the con…
Computer Science (9 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis (4 works) · Mathematics (4 works) · Natural language processing (4 works) · Psychology (4 works)